


Blue Moon

by Summerfield (02X6_ifNow)



Series: Now (Not) Boarding [2]
Category: Touhou Project
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Historical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:48:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26044468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/02X6_ifNow/pseuds/Summerfield
Summary: An epilogue.
Series: Now (Not) Boarding [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1890595
Kudos: 1





	Blue Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for touhou-project.com.

In millennia past, when Lunar emissaries descended to the Earth, they would bring with them always a cutting from an _udonge_ tree, in order that they should remember their true home on the eternal Moon. When the time thus came to make their return there, the branch would be cast aside—and with it, any lingering attachments which might have remained towards the impure Earth.

This tree, the _udonge_ , is not a beautiful one, however, which inspires of painture and poesy. It is a _cursed_ tree, with the worthless, ashen soul of a vampire: one which never grows, and never bears fruit, living only to live, and to spite the very passage of time.

But in the presence of impurity, the _udonge_ transforms. Filled with life, true, Earthly life, the kind of life which may only be lived at the cost of another, it blossoms with scintillating jewels, which shine in all the seven colours of sin. And in the presence of the most impure, it blossoms its most brilliantly: all the better to entrap these most unrepentant of hearts. Its shining crystal branches have been the downfall of untold many, sown by the emissaries of the Moon as seeds of discord among the nations of the Earth.

Today, these branches are little more than quaint curiosities to the people of the Moon, and objects of myth and legend to those below. They were either way primitive, unsubtle means for a primitive, unsubtle age, long since obsoleted by the forged banknote, the secret telegram, and the well-timed bullet. But the _lies_ which they embodied live on, sweet, cloying, in the hearts and designs of Earthlings yet, and the work of the emissaries has never truly ceased …

Till now.

Seiran tossed another dart at the portrait on the corkboard, and swore when it only clipped him by the crest of an ear. Had it been a bullet from a rifle, it would have cracked his teeth, but the blue-haired rabbit had never the same skill at darts.

(She was also dead plastered on scalding Lunar _shochu_.)

The smiling Earthling in the portrait was, himself, no stranger to marksmanship. It ran in his very blood: his father, Ali Sulayman al-Assad, the one who had first won for himself the surname of Lion, would pin a cigarette paper to a mulberry tree, and pierce it with a pistol from a hundred paces out, and this at the venerable old Earthling age of seventy. His forefather in turn, Sulayman al-Wahhish, could drive a sacking needle into the same tree from the same distance, with only an unrifled Ottoman miquelet. And while Hafez al-Assad was not the wild mountain-man his grandfather had been, he had inherited the same steady eyes, and his father’s prodigious memory besides.

When Seiran had fired the _provocateur_ ’s shot into the riotous crowd at Hama, then, Hafez had seen her, and he had _remembered_ her.

Seiran remembered him in turn. She had failed to kill him then, and failed twice more after that: the first time at his private home in sunny Damascus; the second time in foggy London where he had fled, in the wake of the second coup d’état in only three years’ time.

The shot, and the bloody quelling of the riot which followed, had created a rift between the National Command and the Military Committee of the Syrian Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. With the second coup, the rift had grown into a full splintering down the middle of the Ba’ath movement entire, one half falling to Damascus, the other to Baghdad, and their enmity would grow so bitter that Ba’athist Syria would sooner support the Islamic Republic of Iran than hated Ba’athist Iraq, in the withering trench war to come a decade hence.

But that decade was yet to come, and right now, Seiran knew only that she had failed. And not only failed: she had been recalled back to the Moon on unprecedentedly short notice, and had no opportunity now to erase her mistake. Then, layering insult upon insult, within a year of her withdrawal, said _mistake_ had seized power in the _third_ coup of this current decade, and enthroned himself President, and dictator, of the whole Syrian Arab Republic.

This, from the defection of _one_ shit-eating bunny to the fucking Yankee Doodle Dandies.

Seiran hefted another weighted dart in her hand, and focused on a spot between the Earthling’s dark, beady eyes.

“Puppy-loves like _that_ ’ll have the years catchin’ up to you,” someone said, from behind her.

(The dart landed in the wall.)

“Bloody _manyook_ d’you think you are,” muttered Seiran, only barely turning around.

“I’m tellin’ you that for free,” said the rabbit in the newsboy cap, smiling guilelessly through a mouthful of what, to Seiran’s nose, had to have been _mitarashi dango_. “I don’t usually do that, hey?”

“Piss off.”

“Buy you one,” the annoying rabbit counter-offered.

Seiran closed her eyes, and ran her tongue behind her teeth—but ultimately waved her other hand, in raising no objection. Her mood tonight was, if nothing else, unabashedly mercenary, and the other rabbit played straight into it, to her only half chagrin.

“ _Kome_ or _mugi_?” the rabbit asked, and exchanged a briefest nod with the bartender.

“ _Mitarashi_ ,” said Seiran, leaning back and glancing sidelong at the skewer in the rabbit’s hand. When the rabbit blinked in surprise, Seiran closed one shining red eye, and added: “And Copernican _kokuto_.”

(A rich, golden _shochu_ , meticulously brewed from malted rice, blackest cane sugar, and the mineral waters of the Mare Insularum—aged, like all Lunar spirits worth drinking, in casks of unbloomed _udonge_ wood.)

“Don’t much hold back, do you?” said the rabbit, grimacing.

Seiran shrugged. “Offer’s an offer.”

“Ah-hah,” said the rabbit, indecipherably. Still, she conveyed the order faithfully, and doubled it for good measure, finding in that, at least, the means to grin good-naturedly once more. She hopped up onto the stool beside Seiran, hoisting up one pale leg over the other.

“And did you want something else?” asked Seiran curtly.

“Only curious,” came the retort—“about the kind of bunny who goes drinking alone, because she couldn’t catch herself a bloody _lion_.”

Seiran jerked her head sharply round at that, teeth ground tight and face flushing hot with provocation, a curse perched on her tongue. But … if the annoying rabbit’s words had been meant as a taunt, the smile on her lips was unfittingly subdued, and seemed only to tell of a genuine interest underlying them.

“Bastard,” said Seiran anyway, but the vehemence was gone from it.

The rabbit received no offense, only flicking her eyes momentarily downward. Seiran followed them—to the honeyed _dango_ and golden _kokuto_ , which had appeared silently in their midst. Without bothering to ask, the other rabbit helped herself to a skewer, and neatly finished off the one already in her hand, in one fluid motion of exchange.

“I’m payin’,” she said, “sho you go ahead an’ talk.” She paused a moment to chew—almost purring, _sotto voce_ , as if tasting the sweet–savoury confection for the very first time—and her cheeks bulged out ridiculously. “Mmh. All you like. About the clever lion of Damashcush.”

Slowly, and Seiran, blue-haired rabbit and Lunar emissary, felt herself quirking a smile back, infected despite everything else by her fellow emissary’s flagrant, carefree display.

(And Ringo was, of course, a fellow emissary. No other rabbit could have known, or dared approach her the entire night.)

She took up the glass of liquid gold and held it to her lip, glorying in its aroma. Then she set it down, and picked the last dart up from the counter, letting it hang loosely by its fins between just middle and fourth fingers. Sparing barely half a second’s glance over her shoulder, she flung it backhand at the corkboard, where it punched into the middle of the Earthling’s face: right in the bridge of his narrow nose, that he might not taste even a whiff of the beautiful Lunar _kokuto_.

“… He’s no lion,” Seiran replied finally.

And was returned, at last, to the pure, bright Moon.

( _end_ )


End file.
